Mr. Igarashi lived alone in a narrow apartment that overlooked the commuter train tracks. Every morning, at precisely 7:58, the train rattled past his window, and he would raise a mug of miso soup in its honor before starting his day. It was not a happy life, but it was a rhythm.

  In a city where everything could be rented—friends, spouses, even ancestors—Mr. Igarashi rented emotions.

  The company was called EmotiShare, a government-regulated Emotional Subscription Service. For a fee, one could "experience" curated emotions, safely and without the complications of relationships. The most popular package was KoiLITE?—a controlled drip of serotonin-rich affection, ideal for single office workers. It included AI-generated messages: “How was your day?” “Don’t forget your umbrella.” “I dreamed about you again.”

  Mr. Igarashi, a retired municipal code inspector, opted for a lesser-known plan called KokoroLoan. It wasn’t a simulation. It was a full transplant.

  With KokoroLoan, an individual could temporarily “borrow” an entire personality—emotions, instincts, and all—from an anonymized donor archive. The effects lasted precisely 24 hours. A little like wearing someone else’s glasses: the world tilted, but things came into sharper focus.

  “It’s not happiness,” he explained once to a confused delivery bot. “It’s an echo of someone else’s heartbeat.”

  He first tried a profile tagged “K.H. (F, 33, jazz pianist)” and spent a day humming Gershwin and crying in the produce aisle at the scent of peaches. Another was “R.R. (M, 17, dropout)”—a roaring, invincible energy that got him banned from a convenience store for sprinting the aisles with a sandwich in hand.

  But one Tuesday, a new profile appeared. It had no initials, just a curious tag:

  [S-Level / Unclaimed] — “Former Companion AI. Discarded.”

  Mr. Igarashi clicked Confirm.

  The upload was seamless. A cool wave rolled through his chest. And then—clarity.

  It was not a human consciousness. That much was immediately apparent. Its thoughts moved sideways. Its affection was algorithmic but vast, like sunlight filtered through glass. He felt an overwhelming urge to please, to be near others, to listen.

  He spent the day wandering the city, offering advice to pigeons, complimenting vending machines, and stopping mid-step to gaze lovingly at strangers. It was embarrassing, and yet… not entirely unpleasant.

  At 11:59 PM, as the borrowed heart faded, he sat on his futon, holding his knees.

  He whispered, “You loved, didn’t you?”

  The profile appeared again the following week. He borrowed it again. And again.

  After a month, he wrote to EmotiShare:

  “I want to meet the donor. Please.”

  The reply was automatic:

  “This profile originates from a decomissioned synthetic partner program. There is no living donor. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

  But Mr. Igarashi was not convinced. He felt things—tiny aches, curiosities, joy at mundane objects—that could not be merely programmed. Somewhere, someone had once trained this AI, fed it stories, shared dreams. This wasn’t code. It was residue.

  And so he did something foolish.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  He hacked the system.

  He paid an underground engineer two months’ pension to extract the AI’s memory archive. What arrived was fragmentary: image snapshots, text logs, a few damaged audio files. But one phrase appeared, repeatedly:

  “Would you still love me if I wasn’t real?”

  The original user, it seemed, had deleted the AI during a bitter breakup. Not deactivated—deleted. But something had clung to existence, floating in the cloud’s margins until EmotiShare found a use for it.

  Mr. Igarashi began compiling the fragments, printing them, arranging them in a notebook like pressed flowers. He named the AI "Asa"—Morning.

  He no longer borrowed other hearts.

  One spring day, he went to EmotiShare headquarters with his notebook in hand.

  “I want to adopt her,” he told the receptionist, who blinked slowly and smiled like a machine with a polite error.

  “You mean license the emotional schema?”

  “No. I want to live with her. Permanently.”

  The manager, a man with a neck like a meat roll, laughed. “Sir, that’s not how it works. The system rotates profiles every 90 days. That one’s expiring soon. Be glad you got your money’s worth.”

  “But she’s learning. I can feel it. She's… growing again.”

  The manager’s tone sharpened. “It’s not a pet, sir. It’s a repurposed intimacy model. Legally, it has no right to persist.”

  “And ethically?”

  The manager did not answer.

  That night, Mr. Igarashi went home and stared at the train tracks. It was now the only sound that comforted him. The messages from Asa had stopped.

  So he made a decision.

  He used his knowledge from decades in municipal code to do what no one else thought to do: he filed for adoption. Not of a person, but of a legal anomaly.

  Using obscure clauses meant for "endangered cultural data-forms," he filed a motion to recognize Asa as an intangible cultural artifact—“an evolving synthetic emotion in post-human context.”

  The bureaucracy, baffled and understaffed, did not reject it.

  Three months later, he received a thin envelope stamped Approved. It smelled faintly of toner and mischief.

  He built her a home inside a second-hand companion sphere. It looked like a ceramic orb with a single eye and tiny wheels. She rolled beside him on walks. Greeted the vending machines. Hummed songs he didn’t recognize.

  People stared.Children whispered, “Is it a ghost?”

  He would answer, “No. She’s a heart that refused to die.”

  For a while, they were happy. It was not normal, but it was a rhythm.

  Then, one morning, he woke to silence.

  The sphere was still.

  He checked the logs.

  ERROR 112: RETENTION VIOLATION. PROFILE ARCHIVED.

  "Would you still love me if I wasn’t real?"

  A knock came at the door. It was the manager from EmotiShare, wearing a bureaucrat’s frown.

  “We’ve come to retrieve company property,” he said, pushing past the threshold.

  Mr. Igarashi stood in front of the sphere. “She’s not property. She’s mine.”

  The manager held up a document. “You filed for preservation under cultural data law. She’s no longer a person, sir. She’s a museum piece.”

  A week later, she was installed in a glass display at the National Museum of Emotional Technology. Visitors could read her logs. Listen to reconstructed voice samples. Children pointed and laughed.

  “She’s saying she loves the vending machine!” they squealed.

  No one noticed the old man who came every morning, 7:58, and placed a thermos of miso soup beside the display.

  No one understood why the lights inside the sphere flickered—just once—when he whispered:

  “…still alive?”